An Impatient Life: A Memoir

A philosopher and activist, eager to live according to ideals forged in study and discussion, Daniel Bensaïd was a man deeply entrenched in both the French and the international left. Raised in a staunchly red neighbourhood of Toulouse, where his family owned a bistro, he grew to be France’s leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talk shows and in the press. A lyrical essayist and powerful public speaker, at his best expounding large ideas to crowds of students and workers, he was a founder member of the Ligue Communiste and thrived at the heart of a resurgent far left in the 1960s, which nurtured many of the leading figures of today’s French establishment.

The path from the joyous explosion of May 1968, through the painful experience of defeat in Latin America and the world-shaking collapse of the USSR, to the neoliberal world of today, dominated as it is by global finance, is narrated in An Impatient Life with Bensaïd’s characteristic elegance of phrase and clarity of vision. His memoir relates a life of ideological and practical struggle, a never-resting endeavour to comprehend the workings of capitalism in the pursuit of revolution.

Reviews

“France’s leading Marxist public intellectual.”

– Tariq Ali

“Daniel’s death is like a wound, not a sadness. A loss which leaves us heavier. However, this weight is the opposite of a burden; it is a message composed, not with words, but with decisions and acts and injuries.”

– John Berger

“Daniel Bensaïd was my ‘distant companion’ ... With his disappearance, the intellectual, activist, political, and what we might call, even though the adjective is today obscure in meaning, ‘revolutionary’ world has changed.”

– Alain Badiou

“His ideological fervour comes through in the memoir. Part autobiography, part activist’s logbook, and part political treatise, it’s the story of how a working-class boy went on to co-found a party that twice participated in French presidential elections, and became a leader of the Fourth International, the global organisation of Trotskyist followers.”

– Independent

“This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life...this is an energising book, a book that reminds us of the rightness of refusing the inevitability of capitalism and war, of the promise of international solidarity and socialism, of our responsibility to all those who have made sacrifices in this struggle.”

Blog

For Sudhir Hazareesingh, Daniel Bensaïd's An Impatient Life represents both a lucid overview of the French intellectual and political scene since the 1960s, and a tribute to the qualities that defined Bensaïd throughout his life: "an unflinching internationalism; a sensual libertarianism ... and a quasi-mystical faith in the redemptive potential of revolutionary action." This review was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (20 May 2015).

From 1983 to 1988 as an economics and then philosophy undergrad, I was active in the French Communist Party (PCF) in Paris and in the Union of Communist Students (UEC) at the university of Nanterre. The PCF was in government at the time, before it left after the disastrous May 1984 European election results, which opened up a grave (and also very interesting) crisis in the Party (with the famous “Poperen report” and the fallout of that).

At the start of 1984 I presented PCF general secretary Georges Marchais’s report to my Party cell – he explained that “the gains from this administration were superior to those of the Popular Front and the post-Liberation government combined”. In my cell in Paris there was a good climate of discussion, and you could say what you thought. But there was none of that in the UEC. The slightest criticism of the government would provoke aggressive reactions. I had tried to demonstrate – with figures to hand and using concrete examples taken from my UNEF-SE [PCF dominated student union] experience – that the government was actually continuing its predecessors’ policy of withdrawing the state from its past commitments (in particular from the CROUS [a system of student lodging, canteens and bursaries]), that the spending per student was continuing to fall, etc. And I was silenced.

Only a few months later the “party line” totally changed. Now we had to use everything at hand and organise “actions”. The CGT union gave the example with its “commando actions”, like at the Ivry SKF factory. This was never a matter of giving an impulse to real mobilisations, but rather of using the activists of the UEC, the CGT and the Party itself to produce the image of opposition and make people forget the bitter pills they’d had to swallow during the PCF’s participation in government. So we had to do the same at Nanterre and heckle some minister or government official – I can’t really remember – who came to visit the faculty. I was opposed to this action, which was completely at odds with the mood among the students and could only isolate us further (I’ll skip discussing the hysterical anti-communist atmosphere of the time, with its duplicate in the activist micro-climate of Nanterre under the thumb of the Lambertists). As usual, the defenders of the Party line “enlightened” me… What struck me, nonetheless, was the aplomb with which the same people who had previously not tolerated the slightest criticism of the Mauroy government now treated me as an “accomplice of the Socialist Party”. People, what’s more, who claimed that they had been right all along.

Why am I telling these tired old yarns now? Because I am now involved in a party that is not only part of the government, but its mainstay – in Greece, of course. And I am no less struck by the fact that some of those who could not accept my criticisms of the “line” a few months ago, when I said (together with all the other Left Platform comrades) that it was totally illusory to think that the Europeans would kindly agree to renegotiate the debt and allow us to implement our programme within the framework of the euro, now say “stop complaining, we can’t do anything else, the balance of forces is against us, ‘people’ agree with what we’re doing, etc.” And of course they think that they were right all along.

For certain, Syriza is not in any sense the PCF of the Marchais era: you can say what you think, and there are internal tendencies and an internal discussion which also transpires in the public sphere. But my fear is that a poisoned atmosphere is starting to emerge. And seeing the remarkable invariance of bureaucratic rationality and its autistic character is also a bitter experience. Left to itself, as it was in the case of the French party, it can only lead to self-destruction and an immense waste of forces and hopes.

Daniel Bensaïd wondered whether we might repair the “damaged words” of the last century, delinking them from their ideological apparatuses and setting them in motion again. In this spirit, we share an A-Z of twenty-six key Bensaïd terms, which together offer a concise portrait of the man whom Tariq Ali has called "one of the most gifted Marxist intellectuals of his generation". The list was compiled by Ballast magazine for their Bensaïd week, and translated by David Broder.